KPIT Cummins Blog

The fun of participating in a Flash Mob at KPIT Cummins showed Sunil Ravish (member of the Automotive Marketing team), the importance of our corporate values like boundarylessness and teamwork for doing something completely out of the box. 

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star” - Friedrich Nietzsche

February 28, 2012…

Distracted, jittery, I checked my phone again.., Just 30 seconds left. Heart pounding, I looked around at the excited faces of my team.. Then, a countdown, music, and.. time to go!

10 days earlier….

Wikipedia calls flash mobs ‘seemingly pointless’. Flash mobs are all about groups assembling in a public place, performing an unexpected but united act before dispersing back into the crowd. 

When our Automotive Marketing team huddled together during the TecXpedition Week, wondering what we could do to convey team spirit, a flash mob seemed like a perfect idea. It would unite us, and it was definitely an original move. So, we decided to go ahead with it. I was not hesitant, was I? When it comes to experimenting, we all have always been game. Our principal choreographers Aniket Dhawade and Ashish Sharma arranged practice sessions in the executive dining room during late evenings. While the initial few days passed in mixing the song, ridiculing each other’s dance moves, the dance sequence kept evolving day by day. While some steps found immediate acceptance, some were labeled to be boring and repetitive, some steps were out-rightly rejected by a few of us considering the level of difficulty, some moves considered to be the “oh la la” types. The dancers only got better and better, so did the 'accidental dancers' - the group which I belonged to.

D-day (Dance-day!)

Each one of us waited at a different place in the canteen. I waited inside the gym for a signal to start the music. I started the music and came out of the gym. I held my phone to my ears when I very well knew that there was no one on the other side. I recognized a few people through the corner of my eyes, feeling a bit jittery. Just 30 seconds before I was supposed to start what I had to, it felt like a few hours. The countdown was on and the music blared out of the speakers and I could see a few of my team mates moving in!

Aniket started dancing and each one of us joined at designated positions wherever we found space. While a few onlookers wondered if it was a flash mob, some exclaimed that it was one. What we did during the next 2.5 minutes was absolute fun. We all loved the dance, so did we love to see the audience enjoy. The paparazzi, cheering were very special.

We danced, danced, danced and dispersed.

Please allow me to modify what Friedrich Nietzsche said - “You must dance amidst chaos to call it a Flash Mob!”

In the absence of any word for someone who dances in a flash mob – I call them a ‘Flash 
Mob-er’. I became one!

Thanks team. Without you it would not be as special